Blog #2 What BIRTH TYPE Should You Choose? / / Home Birth ~ Hospital ~ Birthing Center?

Updated: Dec 30, 2019

Have you recently become pregnant?

Have you decided your birth plan?!

In ten years my husband and I had 4 boys! We've had 3 home births and one premature hospital birth. I am not an expert, but I speak from this experience. I want to share with you our story of how we decided what birth type we would have and what we learned.

During the summer of 2008 a lot of changes took place for me. I had recently fallen in love and gotten married! Along with my dream of having music be a constant in my life, I also grew up knowing Motherhood was calling me. Without hesitation we (Omar & I) jumped right into creating our family. Like most parents, we had a vision of what it would be like. Of course we assumed challenges would arise and we knew we would handle them.

Interestingly, this process is SOOO much more difficult in real time than in your imagination. The most radical changes were with my body, obviously, but the questions I had to start asking myself from a place of zero experience was quite an adjustment. As a first time pregnant lady at 28 I had never asked myself these important questions:

1. What type of birth will I have?

2. How will I handle the constant challenge of pregnancy?

3. What is my postpartum plan?

Growing up in the very small town of Stevensville, MD I saw and heard little about pregnant Moms and birth stories. I have a few memories of a couple Moms who nursed their babies, but other than that I knew nothing. I knew a Hospital birth was normal and a birth outside of that was like, whoa ~ crazy! Something you saw on T.V depicted as an accident.

I had only thought about the caring for the baby part, the raising the child part. Honestly, since I was a bottle fed baby, I didn’t give much thought towards nursing a baby. And I hadn’t given ANY thought whatsoever to where the birth will take place. I naturally assumed I would do as my Mother did and have a typical Hospital birth.

There I was 3 months pregnant just now giving consideration to these questions.

On the contrary, my husband had given all of these aspects a LOT of thought. As a matter of fact, not only had he been thinking about these things, he was certain of how he and his wife would answer these questions. I admit, it was difficult to accept that he was more knowledgeable on this topic and that he did sound confident in the choices he was suggesting. I had to be the me I really am and be open.

One of my strengths is the ability to listen to something and feel how it hits me. I grew up in a Christian household and I was taught this technique ~specifically to feel it in my stomach. I relied on this then as I have many times. As he was speaking his expressions of experience and truth I felt myself feel in alignment with it. We talked about numerous things: over the counter medicine, prescription drugs, the state of our food industry, what doctors learn in medical school, and on and on...to come to the conclusion that his plan was the one we’ll be embarking on.

Okay, first question:

1. What type of birth will I have?

The options we had were Hospital birth, Birthing Center & Home birth. Because of the space we were living in and I was a first time Mom, I leaned towards the Birthing Center. Omar and his family were strong advocates for Home birth as Omar’s Mom had had SEVEN herself! Frankly, I had never seen one. I had never seen it depicted in a movie accurately and never watched a documentary either. And I was not interested in seeing it. The Birthing Center gave us the compromise we needed as first time parents and as a newer couple making HUGE decisions together. We knew immediately we would not be choosing a Hospital birth.

The Birthing Center offered an all natural birth (vaginal labor and delivery with limited to no medical intervention)

~meaning NO epidural planned,

no drinking the pink juice before blood work,

avoiding routine IV,

no labor induction,

no routine episiotomy,

no continuous fetal monitoring,

no assisted delivery with forceps,

no vacuum extraction and no cesarean section (unless one of these medical interventions are deemed medically NECessary as a last resort!)

Our Midwife delivered over 1,000 babies and spoke of many cases in which she was able to help get babies out through natural techniques.

We were very pleased that the Midwifery office we chose was inside the Anne Arundel Medical Center; the hospital we would trust if we had to go that route. The BC had a large bedroom with a very large bathroom and tub off of it. It also had a room off of the bedroom that was a mini family room/eat-in kitchen for family members who are invited to the birth. Another part to a natural birth is after delivery, the baby goes immediately to your stomach for skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding (instead of taking baby away to be assessed and weighed first) Our birth plan was shaping up.